(Writing) The State of the Rabbit

25Jul

This summer I’ve been trying to focus more on my writing — after all, I’m a writer, and that’s what I do. The trouble is I lead a pretty full life as it is. I have a day job that’s fairly intensive, so I need to spend my work hours actually, you know, working. My commute is pretty long, and while I can definitely fill the time with podcasts (and I do) that takes a bit more time away from my passion. I’m married, and I love my husband, which means I want to spend as much time with him as I can. And I have friends that I love to spend time with too! There’s exercise, and cooking, and making sure the burrow isn’t an absolute mess, and spending time with our rabbit Puckles, and reading, and general adult responsibilities, and…you get the point.

I’ve said all of this before, and if you’re a writer who isn’t making a living at it chances are you have the same devil on your back too. It’s not easy, but the struggle makes success that much sweeter. Or so I’ve been lead to understand.

Despite the difficulty, I feel like I’ve been doing better with writing these days. That means sacrificing time spent doing other things while also learning to become more efficient with the time I do have, but even that’s a good thing. The fact that there’s such limited time to do everything that I want to do means that I really have to sit down and determine my priorities. Once that’s done, I really have to make sure I know how I’m going to focus on them. And then, I painstakingly develop the skills necessary to actually execute on them. Little by little, day by day, I’m growing up.

The blog and the Patreon are top priorities, of course — I’ve committed myself to a certain amount of output for each one, and I must set aside time to make sure I hit those goals. That’s still a work in progress. I had to let the blog drop last week to concentrate on work, the Patreon and a few other things, and I’m still behind. It’ll take some dedicated time and focus to catch up, but I think I can do it.

This weekend, I’ll be running my Pathfinder game for the first time in a long while. If you’ve ever run a tabletop role-playing game, you know how daunting the prep work can be. I went into the whole affair relatively unprepared for the kind of story I wanted to tell, and paid the price for it. When Ryan went to Japan earlier in the year, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to step back, get some knowledge about how to properly run Pathfinder, and actually tinker with the game so that balance and story issues are hammered out.

I’m still not 100% there, but I’m pretty close. I’ve used the race creation rules in the Advanced Race Guide to retool my homebrew races so they’re not quite so overpowered and I’ve made sure that my PCs were mostly up-to-date with their sheets. It was a good chance to revisit their power sets and really understand what they’re good at. I’ve also taken notes on the players and my understanding of what they want out of their games, tinkering with how I tell the story to include more of that. Mostly, I wanted to re-dedicate myself to making the game fun for people. My anxiety about running got in the way of that in this really big way, so even though I’m trying to be more careful and focused I also want to be more relaxed. Not every experiment will work, but being adaptable is one of the most important traits you can have as a game master.

Beyond the blog, the Patreon and Pathfinder, there are a number of projects I’ll need to tackle before September rolls around. There are two story commissions that I need to complete and publish — one needs an editing pass while the other still needs the first draft. A third short story will need to be written for a zine that I’m lucky enough to be a part of, so I’ll need to jump on that. And a short story for a Changeling: the Dreaming anthology needs to be pitched; I’ve finally locked on to an idea for it, so I’ll be putting together the submission for that very soon.

At the end of August, I’ll be headed back to college. I’ve enrolled part-time in a local community college with an aim to get an Associate’s Degree that transfers to a four-year university. I haven’t decided if I’ll try to get a Bachelor’s in English or Psychology, but either way I’m tremendously excited. School’s no joke, of course, so I’ll need to get even better at squeezing every drop out of productivity time that I can.

I’m juggling a lot right now. It’s important that I’m smart about how I spend my time but also self-aware enough to know when I’m being overwhelmed. Stress management is just as important as being productive, and for someone like me — prone to avoidance behaviors when my anxiety kicks into high gear — it’s imperative that I take the time and space necessary to remain grounded and focused.

That will mean having to say no to a lot more things, just for the sake of preserving my sanity. A cup that’s completely full will not retain anything, of course; and the whole point of most of this stuff is to learn and grow as a writer and human being. Having the space to hold what I’m already working with is a necessary part of that process.

I might be a little harder to reach online and sparse in my usual hangouts for a while. I want to get better about setting expectations about my available time and energy, so this is part of that.

Things are busy right now, and they’ll be getting busier. I might be able to dip my toe into the waters of the Internet when I’ve gotten my time figured out, but for now, the limited time and attention has to be devoted to other things.

I’ll still be here, of course, and I welcome comments. I’ll make it a priority to engage here!